The population pyramid is changing worldwide as a result of declining birth rate and improvements in the medical environment. The percentage of the elderly population, in particular, has risen significantly. In 1950, a senior citizen was reared by an average of twelve people in the labor force. As the population pyramid changes, however, the ratio of the latter to the former is lowered on a yearly basis such that the burden on the labor force is increasing. In Taiwan, for example, the aforesaid ratio has dropped to 7:1 and is estimated to reach 2.7:1 in twenty years. More attention, therefore, should be paid to the physical and mental health and medical care of the elderly. In fact, how to create an environment where the aged can lead comfortable, cheerful, and carefree lives while those in the labor force are allowed to devote themselves to work without having to worry about the wellbeing of their senior family members is a subject that concerns us all.
Physiological aging takes place as we grow old. An aged person not only may respond more slowly to the outside world, but also may become less capable of performing various body movements. In many cases, physiological aging can cause inconvenience to a person's daily life, especially a sick person's. Such inconveniences may also give rise to danger and hence should be dealt with seriously. An elderly person, when not tended to, may topple over, bump into an object by accident, or even collapse to the ground due to a sudden physiological condition. To prevent the danger associated with any of the foregoing scenarios from escalating without timely help, more and more importance is attached to domestic safety, telecare, and like issues, and because of that, related applications and technologies are being developed rapidly. A notable example of products developed to cope with the aforesaid situations is motion-sensing floor mats.
Typically, a conventional motion-sensing floor mat is provided therein with a sensor module. When subjected to pressure, the sensor module sends a sensing signal to a monitoring device (e.g., a computer), in order for a caregiver (e.g., a family member who is working away from home or a professional caregiver in a nursing home) to know via the monitoring device the current motion of the elderly person being monitored and take necessary actions as soon as an abnormal condition is identified. While the conventional motion-sensing floor mats are helpful in notifying a caregiver of the occurrence of an accident, they have limitations in use. For example, when the conventional motion-sensing floor mats are placed over a small area, a caregiver detecting an emergency through the monitoring device can indeed go to the matted area at once to provide necessary assistance. If, however, the conventional motion-sensing floor mats are laid extensively in a house, or even in a large nursing home of several stories and with differently-sized partitioned areas on each floor, a caregiver spotting an abnormal condition through the monitoring device may have problem identifying the location of the abnormality immediately, let alone reaching the location at the earliest possible time to deal with the situation. The problem can be somewhat solved by dividing the large area into a plurality of smaller ones, monitoring each smaller area with a separate monitoring device, and using a host device to collect the information gathered by each monitoring device. Nevertheless, this truly feasible solution does not work well if the entire area to be monitored is not divided sufficiently, and dividing the entire area excessively will, on the other hand, incur a considerable increase in the expenses for purchasing the monitoring devices, which is by no means ideal.
In summary of the above, the conventional motion-sensing floor mats allow a caregiver to know the occurrence of an accident rapidly, but if such floor mats are applied to an extensive area, a caregiver will find it difficult to locate the accident immediately and hence cannot get to the site of the accident right away. It is therefore important for those in the related industry to design a monitoring system that not only incorporates motion-sensing floor mats, but also can establish a topology matrix for the motion-sensing floor mats in use so that, in addition to being alerted to the occurrence of an accident instantly, a caregiver can locate the accident without delay.